“You grow a thick skin,” the officer said, her mouth pulled into a frown, as if to demonstrate: this is thick skin. “Especially when you know it’s the mother’s own fault.”
It would have been better if the baby blankets had gone to the trash. Instead, one of the unit cops had redistributed them to the women on death row who had made them. When Gordon was next back there, Candy Peña had patched together her two baby blankets into a large vest, a sort of poncho, in soft, gauzy blue and yellow. She held it up. “I hope it fits?”
Knit was the past tense of knit. And no one wanted what Candy Peña knit, not even Gordon, who put the vest in a paper bag deep in the trunk of his car and tried to forget about it.
* * *
He let whiskey pad his brain at Baressi’s one night and was overcome by nostalgia for Simone, the woman he’d dated in Berkeley. Recently she had called and left a message, wondering if he’d plugged in his refrigerator. That had been her joke when they’d dated, meant to imply he was a work in progress, not ready yet, but eventually headed for, life with a plugged-in refrigerator. It was a way of equating his lack of domestic instincts with his rejection of her, which made him guiltier than she knew, because it wasn’t quite right. It was Simone he’d had reservations about, not parting ways with bachelorhood. He had not called back, and why not? Now that he was drunkish and lonely he could not think of the reason. The young bartender, with her big smile, her fake breasts pressing against the buttons of her shirt, kept asking the assembled but separate drinkers, all male, if they needed anything. “Y’all have everything y’all need?” She asked it like this was Appalachia and not the Central Valley.
On the TV above her was handheld footage of a city taken over by a Shiite militia, men and boys in white face masks ripping past the camera on motor scooters, piles of debris burning casually in the background. Someone asked the bartender to put on minor league baseball. Gordon would read about the militia when he got home. The war was private. It was between each man and his computer. Gordon might have opted for a more ascetic life and skipped getting DSL, but the previous tenant already had it installed. The landlord said he was one of the lucky ones. Many addresses on the mountain could not get service.
I’ll send Simone a postcard, he thought. Be oblique. Not disclose that he hoped to make her cry out like that puma on his mountain, in the scene he imagined. Simone, having come down to his cabin in the woods, his books in little stacks along the dirty floor, his bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter. A woman there to witness his solitary life, his acquired taste for valley beauty—to the untrained eye, not beautiful. The valley was a brutal, flat, machined landscape, with a strange lemonade light, thick with drifting topsoil and other pollutants from farm equipment and oil refineries. It was a man-made hell on earth but then again a real valley, with mountain ranges on either side. It was the size of industrial agriculture, scaled for that. It was difficult to imagine what it had looked like before it was farmed. It was hard even to imagine what it had looked like farmed in the old-fashioned way, by people. Machines shook the almond trees in synchronous violence. Their fruit fell to the ground with every mechanical jolt. Other machines swept the unhulled almonds into furrows, and yet other automated contraptions sucked the almonds up chutes and into hoppers. That all happened very quickly once a year, the September harvest. Most of the time the huge parcels of almond orchard were empty and quiet.
He paid his tab and walked to the gas station next door. The gas station was the main booze outlet in town and there was a line, men and boys squinting under the harsh lights as they waited to buy their malt liquor and Mad Dog. Gordon retrieved a small Perrier from the refrigerator cases, for the trip up the mountain. The carbonation helped him stay alert while driving. The kid in line behind him gazed at Gordon’s drink as he set it on the counter. “What is that?” he asked. The green, pear-shaped glass bottle looked suddenly comely and exotic. Gordon understood the kid had mistaken it for something alcoholic. “It’s uh, this French water.”
“French water.” The kid tsked. “I thought it was some new kind of drank.”
They had no postcards at the gas station. Try the Dollar Tree, the cashier suggested. He found no postcards of Stanville. Apparently it wasn’t a place you commemorated and if he wanted to be in touch with Simone he could just send her an e-mail like a normal person.
* * *
That Christmas, his week off, he drove up to Berkeley to sleep on Alex’s couch.
“How’s your one-room life?” Alex asked.
Gordon did not contact Simone. He and Alex made the nostalgia circuit: the used bookstores, the Irish cafeteria in the flats, the coffeehouses on Telegraph that were filled with good-looking women who worked hard at appearing effortless and natural. The barbecue place on Shattuck and the blues club next door, which could have had a sign, when they were in college, Smokiest Tavern on Earth, but no one smoked in bars now; it was illegal. Alex and Gordon talked about the war. They both checked the same websites obsessively, Informed Comment for analysis and iCasualties for metrics. Found the same things funny and the same things heinous. It was all heinous, but some of it was funny. The way Bush talked about “Mr. Maliki,” whom the CIA had installed as president. “I’m trying to help the man!” Bush said with real but clueless desperation, at a failed press conference.
Trying to help the man! Alex kept repeating.
Just after Christmas, the new Iraqi government hung Saddam Hussein. Gordon and Alex watched it on the internet.
“He was pretty dignified,” Alex said. “He was being heckled as he died and yet I feel he got the last word.”
Gordon went over the bridge to San Francisco alone, ate at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown that his student Romy Hall had told him about. Not that she was recommending it to him. She listed it among places she missed. The cook, she’d said, has this funny habit. After he uses them, he bangs his cooking tongs twice, and tugs on his shirt. His smock has a big grease splotch where he does that. And his father sits chain-smoking and chopping meat, upstairs, where the bathrooms are. The cook was there, on Gordon’s visit. He banged the tongs twice and pulled on his shirt. The father was upstairs, chain-smoking and chopping a huge pile of meat.
On New Year’s, he and Alex went to a party in Oakland, a typical situation of people jammed in a kitchen and asking pointless questions like, What do you do? And, Where are you from? The women paid extra attention to Gordon, not knowing already what the problem was with him, as they had already established with the other single men at that party, according to Alex. Some of them were former grad students who’d branched off from the English or Rhetoric or Comp Lit departments into psychoanalysis. Not just undergoing it but putting out a shingle. Alex said that he’d been labeled a male hysteric, which mostly meant the woman who blithely diagnosed him wanted to sleep with him but found him too wily and little-brotherish for an actual relationship.
When Gordon hesitantly mentioned what he did for work, after being asked several times, the women in the kitchen were on him like a plague of locusts.
“Really? A prison. That must be hard.”
“Prison guards. I wouldn’t be able to look at those people.”
“They don’t even wear their own clothes. Like cops, but even worse. What a fucked-up life.”
Much discussion among the women about the scum of the earth who worked as guards. He did not have the courage, or maybe it was the will, to ask if these women had ever known a prison guard. And why would he defend prison guards? He hated them himself. But if a person got outside their own bubble they would see that prison guards were poor people without reasonable options. One had just blown his head off in a guard tower at Salinas Valley. He could have told them this, engaged in corrective arguments with these women at the party. But wasn’t it obvious? Didn’t even wear their own clothes. The interaction brought back anxieties from grad school, the way his peers could casually criticize others they didn’t know anything about.
As the
first and only member of his family to pursue so-called higher education, maybe Gordon was prone to hypersensitivity. He had encountered people in graduate school who were eager to declare working-class pedigree, and they maybe had one parent with less education, or the family had been “poor,” but college-educated. Either way, if someone was insisting loudly on their own authentic origin, this was generally taken by Gordon as evidence they weren’t actually working-class. If they were from a background like Gordon’s, they would know to hide it, the way Gordon did, because the fact of his pioneering status was itself proof of just how tenuous his escape was.
Some people he knew showed up at the party, friends from the department who had gotten post-docs and talked about their upcoming job interviews, the details of their academic book contracts, as if these were interesting subjects. The women were doing that grad school thing of air-quoting to install distance between themselves and the words they chose, these bookish women with an awkwardness he used to find cute. Gordon did not want to discuss his life with these people. He drank, as a temporary salve for his alienation.
He and Alex woke up with hangovers.
With Alex, at least, Gordon could express something of what it was like at Stanville. He had been describing his students, giving Alex the impression that Romy Hall was just one more student he helped, or tried to help, equal with the others, which made him inwardly aware that it wasn’t the case.
Alex started questioning him about his involvement with prisoners. Alex talked about Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott. Alex said he wondered whether Mailer was responsible for what happened after he got Jack Henry Abbott, his little pet project, out of prison.
He wasn’t a pet project, Gordon said.
“Yeah yeah,” Alex said. “He wasn’t. He was a person. But did Norman Mailer understand that?”
* * *
His first day back at work, the warden put the prison on lockdown because of fog. It wasn’t even real fog. It was haze from crop dusters that sprayed the almond fields surrounding the prison. Lockdown meant everyone confined to their cells. No work exchange, no classes, no movement. He would be paid to do nothing like everyone at the facility, but he felt a sense of regret. He would not see her, would not tell her he’d gone to her Vietnamese place on Sixth Street.
He went home and let impulse drive his actions. Called the number she had given him. Jackson Hall was the name of the kid, written on a pink piece of paper. I am just inquiring. She doesn’t even have to know I made this call. The person who answered told him to dial another number. At the new number he was put on hold for a very long time, and then passed to someone’s voice mail. After several days, someone called him back and left a message. Gordon was at work. He called the number the next morning, reached a voice mail and left another message. This went on for weeks, because Gordon wasn’t home much, since he worked down in the valley and lived up on the mountain.
What he eventually learned, when he spoke with a human being at San Francisco’s Family and Children Services, was exactly proof of why he should not have gotten involved.
20
A few years ago some fuckers built a vacation house just across Stemple Pass Road. Motorcycle and snowmobile fiends. They would buzz up and down the road past my cabin most weekends, summer and winter. Last summer they were worse than usual, sometimes made it a three-day-weekend. It was getting absolutely intolerable. My heart was going bad. Any emotional stress, anger above all, makes it beat irregularly. It got so that the constant cycle noise was choking me with anger, heart going wild. Risky to commit crimes so close to home, but I figured if I didn’t get these guys the anger would literally kill me. So one night in fall I sneaked over there, though they were home, and stole their chainsaw. Buried it in the swamp.
Couple of weeks later I chopped my way into their house, smashed up interior pretty thoroughly. It was a real luxury place. They also had a mobile home there. I broke into that, too. Found a silver-painted motorcycle inside. Smashed it up with my axe. They had four snowmobiles sitting outside. I thoroughly smashed engines of these.
A week or so later cops came up here and asked had I seen anyone fooling around any buildings. Also asked if I had any problems with motorcycles. The truth crossed their minds. But probably they didn’t seriously suspect me. Otherwise their questions would not have been so perfunctory.
I’m pleased I was so collected in answering cops’ questions.
21
This is how a guy never, ever wants to wake up: handcuffed, and in a hospital bed. But that was how Doc found himself. Cuffed to the bed. A doctor walked in. Not a prison medical technician’s assistant, but a real doctor. He was even wearing a white coat. The doctor leaned over him.
“You’re awake,” he said. “Can you hear me okay?”
Doc nodded.
“Do you know how you got here?”
Doc shook his head. He had no goddamned idea.
“Okay, that’s okay. Let’s start with basics. Do you know what year it is?”
“It’s—”
Doc did not know what year it was. But it dawned on him that he knew how to answer this stupid question.
“It’s the year after last year.”
The doctor frowned. “Do you know where you are?”
Doc looked around. Saw nothing but a metal cart with pills in paper cups. An armed guard sitting on a chair. The room had no windows, and there was nothing on the walls. He looked down at his body. Saw a garment that was half a garment. His hand was plastered with tape holding a needle in. Tubes ran from his hand up to a metal stand with a bag hanging from it, half full of clear liquid. A person who must have been a nurse came in and eyed the bag. Squeezed it in a way that seemed reckless, and walked out of the room. Doc’s cuffed wrists were chained to the bed’s metal rails. His ankles, too, were manacled to the bedrails. He had no clue where he was. All he knew was that his skull felt like it had been split in half by a concrete spillway. Icy water splashed through the spillway, pushing his brains apart.
“Any sense of where you are?” the doctor asked again.
“Yes. I am directly above the center of the earth.”
Hey, at least it was an answer.
The doctor smirked. “All right, funny guy. And can you tell me your name?”
“I can,” Doc said. “I know my name. I know it!”
“Congratu-fuckin-lations,” the guard called out from his chair.
“It’s Richard L. Richards. See this?” Doc glanced at his own forearm, where he had a big dollar sign tattooed and underneath it, FUCK YOU I’M RICH. It was a joke. He was Rich, Rich Richards, even if people called him Doc. He’d discovered it on the wall of a tattoo parlor in Hollywood, among the designs customers could choose. Doc didn’t have amnesia. He knew who he was. Fuck you, I’m Rich. He just got his bell rung somehow and could not remember the some or how.
He had a shackle around his waist. A stun shackle, actually. If he tried to pull away, it would zap him good and fierce.
“What did I do?” he asked the doctor. “Did I kill somebody?”
The armed guard at the door laughed long and loud. “Did I kill somebody,” he imitated in a mock-high voice.
“You sustained a traumatic brain injury,” the doctor explained. “You almost died. You’ve been in an induced coma for eight weeks now, while we waited for the swelling to go down.”
“Has this asshole been sitting there guarding me the whole time?”
“Time and a half, actually,” the asshole said.
The doctor explained to Doc that he was in a hospital in Lodi.
“Fuck, I hate Lodi.”
But had he ever been to Lodi? He wasn’t sure.
* * *
Traumatic brain injury, they kept repeating at him. The doctor gave him a pamphlet, “Educating Your Loved Ones About Your TBI.” It was what they gave out at that hospital, which did not treat convicts unless it was forced to. Doc didn’t have any loved ones, but he read it anyway. He would be sleepin
g a lot, his imaginary loved ones were meant to understand. He might seem to have undergone a personality transformation, and present now as more mild, or more angry, less or more prone to violent outburst, gifted in a savant-like way, or blunted and dulled in intelligence and executive functioning. Loved ones, for those who had them, should be patient about these changes, and about the recovering person’s confusions and sensitivities, his vertigo, his atypical ideas and erratic moods.
Doc did have a lot of strange thoughts over the days he lay in that bed, waiting for the nurse to come in and squeeze and change the IV bag. Mostly they were thoughts about country music stars, who roamed his mind like ponies on a circle track. These stars, men and women both, were fancy, dressed to perform for thousands onstage and many thousands more in television land. They were folks who seemed like old friends of the family, but he didn’t know what family, or whose. There was a reunion feeling crowding into his mind, many people gathering on the stage for an all-star number. Dolly Parton with her dimples. Roy Acuff. Ray Pillow. Ray Price the Cherokee Cowboy. Skeeter Davis. Ferlin Husky. Everyone in on “Wildwood Flower.”
Cut to a commercial for Martha White Flour, sung by Flatt and Scruggs.
The doctor said that brain injuries could do that. Make you see a memory clearly, or hear music, or in this case both.
Doc’s sadistic foster dad, Vic, had been fond of the Grand Ole Opry and watched the TV show. Porter Wagoner was his foster father’s favorite. Porter Wagoner wore denim jackets with cutaway tails to showcase his fry-pan-sized rodeo buckle. His face was tall and oval-shaped like the canvas opening of a covered wagon. His slack creases could have sliced ham, slacks that were too form-fitting to need any belt, much less a rodeo buckle, and the idea that a dandy like Porter Wagoner had been a winner or even a contestant in any legitimate rodeo was not realistic, but it was part of the culture.
The Mars Room Page 19
